At 85-15 Wareham Place, the only residents appear to be 20 or 30 feral cats in the yard.
Photo: Nick Fraccaro
When Deborah Ayala-Braun moved to her home on Wareham Place, it was sort of fun to tell visitors about the story of the house next door — a faux Tudor, like others across Jamaica Estates. Number 85-15 had been the childhood home of Donald Trump, pleasant but far less showy than the gilded Fifth Avenue penthouse where he ended up. Fourteen years later, Ayala-Braun has very different feelings: “Everyone wants to say it’s Donald Trump’s birth house,” she said. “But after that it was somebody else’s house, and after that it was somebody else’s house.” And the latest owner, seemingly drawn here by Trump’s name, has been a nightmare for neighbors who are now considering tackling an odd neighborhood project: how to buy back a house that was sold to an LLC owned by an absentee investor, then left to rot.
The former president’s Rosebud, a warm childhood memory, is now more like Grey Gardens. On a visit earlier this week, a sign that reads “DO NOT TAKE KITTENS FROM THIS PROPERTY” hid a scraggly gray tabby that scowled, then darted away. Neighbors say the address is now a refuge for an estimated 20 to 30 feral cats, fed by a volunteer. (Nobody is eating the cats or the pets of the people that live there.) The pungent smell in the front yard is now as off-putting as the creaky gothic metaphor the place has become; the mailbox is stuffed with overdue bills, the doorknob is smashed, and cobwebs have taken over the windows.
Photo: Nick Fraccaro
The lawn has grown haggard — after neighbors called the city to complain, someone who called himself an employee of the owner has come out occasionally to mow. Bagged dog feces tossed by passersby sit on the front doorstep, and long-faded notices from the Department of Buildings and utilities companies, tacked to the entryway, flutter in the wind. The shrubs are overgrown.
The Wareham Place house (where Donald lived till he was 4, when Fred Trump built and moved the family into a larger home nearby) became a kind of tourist attraction before the 2016 election, based on headlines like “4 Things You Need To Know About Donald Trump’s Childhood Home.” Reporters used the place as a symbol: “Trump’s Boyhood Home Now Among Most ‘Exclusive’ Properties in U.S.” The month after his election, the New York Post reported that an opportunistic real-estate flipper had purchased the place for $1.4 million. That was reportedly twice its market value, but maybe not: Less than three months later, the house flipped again for $2.4 million. News outlets jockeyed (unsuccessfully) to find the buyer behind “Trump Birth House LLC.” Michael X. Tang, a lawyer in Flushing who specializes in overseas real-estate investments for mainland Chinese buyers, facilitated some of the paperwork, but Tang wouldn’t talk. The next summer, it became an Airbnb at $725 a night. A wave of enterprising features writers booked rooms to write ruminative “In Search of Trump” pieces while staying as guests in the house. In less than a week, the city issued a partial vacate order for the cellar, which had been illegally converted into an apartment. In 2019, it was put up for sale again with a can-you-guess-the-price gimmick, drawing no takers. The next year, a GoFundMe attempted to raise $3 million to purchase and donate the house to Trump as a monument to his presidency. It raised less than $8,000.
Photo: Nick Fraccaro
And now? “Where to begin?” said Ayala-Braun, letting out an exasperated sigh and rattling off a list of complaints as she scrolled through her phone pictures. “There was the pipe that burst, which flooded our basement and other neighbors.” Because the houses share some old-fashioned circuitry, a problem at 85-15 knocked out her power, and thus her and a number of neighbors’ air-conditioning, for a week one summer. “We were dying,” she said. And the house seemed to invite pranksters; a neighbor’s security camera caught an attempted break-in. The owner seemed to have little interest in correcting any of this: Contacting them wasn’t possible, and the DOB says nobody filed paperwork to correct the illegal work on the cellar. Its owner is up to date on taxes and even paid the DOB’s $2,200 fine, so the house can’t be seized.
Recently, neighbors have been talking about raising cash to buy the eyesore and sell it yet again to someone who’d care for it. They have no idea whether the owner would even take their offer, and their case is made difficult because of the LLC and its possibly foreign owner. They speculate that someone bought it to game the EB-5 visa program — but it’s difficult to prove that, and a buyer could have put more than $1 million on any house, including a Manhattan pied-à-terre that would be much easier to rent out. Besides, the owner, whoever it is, presumably has Trump-specific reasons for buying and holding the property and may not let it go to just anyone.
The house looked a lot better in 2016.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
After seeing the home’s terrible state in person and speaking with neighbors like Ayala-Braun about the last eight years, it’s understandable why for Ayala-Braun, any cute metonymy or metaphor that writers have turned the place into feels trite. “I want it to be occupied,“ she said. “I want it to have purpose. I want it to have its own history going forward.”
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